Representatives from 24 companies, reflecting the warranty management policies and return-rate performances of 36 total product families, participated in this research.

Best Practices, LLC used both field surveys and interviews to complete this study. All participants contributed survey data, while deep-dive interviews were also conducted with five warranty management and quality executives to harvest additional key insights.

Key Findings

Return-rate reporting by geographic region is not common: only one third of companies aggregate and report return-rate data in this manner. Instead, most report data in terms of individual products (81%) and business units (76%).

Quality groups lead key warranty activities at most companies, including return-rate tracking (at 54% of companies), return-rate analysis (67%), and overall warranty performance assessment (54%). The task of setting warranty policy and establishing warranty periods is most often led by quality groups (29%) or by sales / account managers (29%).

Three quarters of companies provide Root Cause Failure Analysis to clients, though there are significant differences in how proactively and to what extent this data is disseminated. The use of quality reporting often aims at achieving transparency, with the ultimate goal of instilling greater customer confidence in service.